“These new technologies and approaches have done much more than just solve the problems around petabytes of data and thousands of events per second. They are the right way to do data. That’s why I’m not convinced the term ‘big data’ was a good choice for us to land on as an industry. It’s really ‘smart data’ or ‘scalable data’”–Tim Gasper, Infochimps

“My favorite thing about data is its vast potential to transform almost every aspect of our world. Just as personal computers changed the way we communicate with each other and create new products, data is going to soon drive almost every decision we make, from what movies we watch to what medical treatments we receive. There is almost no limit to the ways in which data can be used to make us all more productive, efficient, and more aware”–Jake Porway, DataKind

“We have more data in many ways than Google”–Qi Lu, Microsoft (see my May 2011 post on his talk about the future of the Web)

“Azure is a real threat to Amazon Web Services, Google and other cloud companies because of its installed base. They have data from places like Bing and Xbox, and in Excel they have the world’s most widely used analysis software”–Anthony Goldblom, Kaggle

“What we’re witnessing in 2012 is the convergence of the big data phenomenon and politics… Elements such as farmer’s market locations and the less obvious drinking habits are now being evaluated to help give the candidates an added advantage”–Melissa Thermidor, LatentView Analytics

“Companies will have to morph for big data. The companies that flow with information will survive, but we’re going to be overwhelmed”–Adrian Gardner, CIO, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

“Big data is an approach where you’re doing compute and data together and you’re not concerned about the data that you’re handling. You don’t have to pre-process it, segment it, decide what type it is and then route it to different clusters or silos. It’s just there. The developer doesn’t have to understand what his limitations are; he can just process the data”– Jack Norris, MapR

“Large financial companies are innovating in big data, first in their risk management areas and compliance areas because those are the places where the most savings can be made from fraud detection and things like that. But then the use of those technologies does branch out into other areas of the organization to help them perhaps predict where stock prices are going to go or where markets are going to trend and so on”—Andrew Nicklin, director of research and development, NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT)